You must make choices. You must make decisions. A playscript is a road map with many forks in the roads. At every fork, each designer and the team must make a decision about direction. In the end, you may all make the same choices, or you might make different choices, but you must all wind up at the same destination. If you’re uncomfortable making choices or decisions, now is a good time to consider a career change.
Many people are reluctant to take the risk of making a choice. That’s why the corporate world created middle management. A paper pushing station is a good place for people afraid to make a choice.
Right, wrong, or indifferent, any choice is better than no choice. Learn to make a decision, and then to defend your decision. In fact, always create argument for defending any decision early in your process. If you’ve made a correct choice, this will be easy. If you’re wrong, you can talk yourself out of a bad idea before it has seen the light of day.
Designers, actors, and directors make choices in interpretation. The script may contain many ideas, research may bring new ideas to light, but deciding, or choosing, what and where to focus defines the production.
Sometimes, at the end of the day, a choice made just because it looks good is valid.
Choices can help lead to establishing a Point of View, just as having a Point of View can help guide making Choices. At some point, you will always, or often find yourself working back and forth between these modes. This book is linear, the script is linear; even if the story is non-linear. Your process is not, and likely will not, always be linear.
Thus far we have mostly been discussing information gathering. Whether that’s reading, research, analysis, tone, or emotional reactions, it’s all been about spreading as wide a net as possible, in order to have as much to choose from as you form, define, and refine, your concept.
Design is sometimes a process of elimination.
You’re not going to use everything. That’s OK. In fact, that’s good. A florist once told me that he didn’t like to sell all of his roses on Valentine’s Day. He liked to have a few dozen roses left over. That’s how he knew he had ordered enough.
The same is true of a designer’s preparation. If you use everything you learn, you have either not curated well, or you didn’t do enough work. You can’t decide what to use if you don’t know what’s available.
If the florist sold all of his roses, he didn’t know how many he might have sold. If a designer uses everything they’ve got, then that designer doesn’t know if they found the right stuff.
Visual storage at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, England.
Curating, or Focusing Down is the process a designer goes through when reviewing the material they have gathered. Subtracting from your gathered information Focuses your ideas and your attention. Don’t necessarily try to use everything, that may clutter the design and confuse the story for the audience.
Does the text, or the lyrics, provide information that the designs do not have to reinforce? Specifically the text, not the stage directions., which may or may not be the author’s own words.
Just because the action is taking place in a forest, that does not mean you need trees. If you do need trees, how are those trees specific to the play and the production. If there are no trees, what’s there?
Eliminating ideas or information is a series of choices.
Shakespeare’s The Tempest begins with a storm, a tempest one might say. Does that mean you need to create the rain and wind that destroy a considerable wooden vessel when it runs aground in the theatre? As is generally true, the Bard’s words do quite the job of describing the action.
Act I, Scene I.
On a ship at sea: a tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard.
Enter a Master and a Boatswain
MASTER
Boatswain!
BOATSWAIN
Here, master: what cheer?
MASTER
Good, speak to the mariners: fall to’t, yarely, or we run ourselves aground: bestir, bestir.
Exit
Enter Mariners
BOATSWAIN
Heigh, my hearts! cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! yare, yare! Take in the topsail. Tend to the master’s whistle.—Blow, till thou burst thy wind, if room enough!
Enter Alonso, Sebastian, Antonio, Ferdinand, Gonzalo, and others
ALONSO
Good boatswain, have care.
Where’s the master? Play the men.
BOATSWAIN
I pray now, keep below.
ANTONIO
Where is the master, boatswain?
BOATSWAIN
Do you not hear him? You mar our labour: keep your cabins: you do assist the storm.
GONZALO
Nay, good, be patient.
BOATSWAIN
When the sea is. Hence! What cares these roarers for the name of king? To cabin: silence! trouble us not.
GONZALO
Good, yet remember whom thou hast aboard.
The shipwreck in a 1797 engraving by Benjamin Smith after a painting by George Romney.
BOATSWAIN
None that I more love than myself. You are a counsellor; if you can command these elements to silence, and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more; use your authority: if you cannot, give thanks you have lived so long, and make yourself ready in your cabin for the mischance of the hour, if it so hap. Cheerly, good hearts! Out of our way, I say.
Exit
GONZALO
I have great comfort from this fellow: methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is perfect gallows. Stand fast, good Fate, to his hanging: make the rope of his destiny our cable, for our own doth little advantage. If he be not born to be hanged, our case is miserable.
Exeunt
Re-enter Boatswain
BOATSWAIN
Down with the topmast! yare! lower, lower! Bring her to try with main-course.
A cry within
A plague upon this howling! they are louder than the weather or our office.
Re-enter Sebastian, Antonio, and Gonzalo
Yet again! what do you here? Shall we give o’er and drown? Have you a mind to sink?
SEBASTIAN
A pox o’ your throat, you bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog!
BOATSWAIN
Work you then.
ANTONIO
Hang, cur! hang, you whoreson, insolent noisemaker! We are less afraid to be drowned than thou art.
GONZALO
I’ll warrant him for drowning; though the ship were no stronger than a nutshell and as leaky as an unstanched wench.
BOATSWAIN
Lay her a-hold, a-hold! set her two courses off to sea again; lay her off.
Enter Mariners wet
MARINERS
All lost! to prayers, to prayers! all lost!
BOATSWAIN
What, must our mouths be cold?
GONZALO
The king and prince at prayers! let’s assist them,
For our case is as theirs.
SEBASTIAN
I’m out of patience.
ANTONIO
We are merely cheated of our lives by drunkards.
This wide-chapp’d rascal--would thou mightst lie drowning.
The washing of ten tides!
GONZALO
He’ll be hang’d yet,
Though every drop of water swear against it
And gape at widest to glut him.
A confused noise within: ‘Mercy on us!’-- ‘We split, we split!’-- ’Farewell, my wife and children!’-- ‘Farewell, brother!’-- ’We split, we split, we split!’
ANTONIO
Let’s all sink with the king.
SEBASTIAN
Let’s take leave of him.
Exeunt Antonio and Sebastian
GONZALO
Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground, long heath, brown furze, any thing. The wills above be done! but I would fain die a dry death.
Exeunt
How can the designs best help advance this bit of the story? Is this a huge scenic construction and special effects project? Is it just lighting and wet costumes? A dance? Is the sound of the storm actually storm noises, or music? Perhaps a combination of natural sounds and musical composition?
These are choices.
Miranda by John William Waterhouse.
The storm is critical to getting the play started. No storm, no story. The tempest is the inciting incident. However, is this the place where the production needs to invest a huge amount of the budget? In film terms; there aren’t many pages involved here. Pages convert to screen time in film helping departments to allocate resources, like budget money.
So, while the set designer may have spent time researching 16th- and 17th-century sailing vessels, perhaps all that might be needed is a piece of sail cloth? Perhaps the projections designer can make use of the research and or that piece of cloth? In any event, the storm is critical but short and the choices have to quickly help tell, and advance the story.
King Henry V, by William Shakespeare, at the Great River Shakespeare Festival. Directed by James Edmondson, set design by R. Eric Stone, costume design by Meg Weedon, lighting design by Lonnie Rafael Alcaraz.
Sometimes, it’s best for the designs to get out of the way. Shakespeare’s Henry V is the final part of a tetralogy, that includes Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1, and Henry IV, Part 2. Original audiences would have been familiar with the title character, who appeared also in the Henry IV plays. In Henry V, he has become an adult and conquers France.
In the Prologue, the Chorus provides the exposition;
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash’d in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide on man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth;
For ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o’er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.
Exit
Henry IV & V costume design by Jennifer Caprio.
What stagecraft can help these words? What special effects do these words need? Perhaps in a film version this speech might be replaced or augmented with legions of longbows and soldiers on horseback, but a few words, and the audience’s imagination will work wonders in a darkened theatre.
What you don’t use for this piece you may use for another play, on another day. Just as you may reuse ideas or research from your own past experience or work to define a new project. Those concepts may take the same, or a new form. Past work might just inspire and avenue to pursue for a new interpretation.
Choice is Power.
What you learn preparing for each show expands your personal base body of knowledge. Nothing ever goes to waste.
Frankly, designers make choices and make decisions every minute of every day. Then they defend those decisions. Everything you do while designing is a choice. Every line, every doodle, every note, every thought you have, and accept or choose focuses your ideas and interpretation. Sometimes the choices are deliberate, sometimes, like when the pencil just moves across the page, the choice just happens.
Sometimes you make choices in a deliberate manner, sometimes you stumble onto choices and go with them. Sometimes, the clock runs out. As always, the producer has sold tickets to opening night, and there will be an audience that expects to see your work. The clock can force your hand. Hopefully, in that case you have stumbled onto great options.
Near the beginning of The Scottish Play (it is considered bad luck to say the name of this play in the theatre, we’ll not take any chances), three witches tell the character Macbeth that he will be king. It would be a choice for the actor playing the title role to adopt the persona of a king right then and there as he now knows his fate. Another choice would be for the actor, and the production, to resist this destiny. Eventually the forces of the play will overcome this approach. Each Interpretation, or Point of View is valid, there may be more, but obviously only one can be selected.
For Souvenir by Stephen Temperley at the Vermont Stage Company, Lighting Designer Jeffrey E. Salzberg chose to isolate focus to help illustrate perceptions of beauty and art. Carl J. Danielsen and Nancy Johnston are pictured. The production was directed by Sara Lampert Hoover, with set design by Jeff Moderegor, costume design by Rachel Kurland, and sound design by Joel Abbot.
Research may also mean searching for the right image. That will eventually mean choosing an image. If you’re distracted while headed in a certain direction and you stop to examine the distraction, you have made a decision. That’s a choice. That decision might then affect the design of your current project, that distraction may later inspire another project.
Stumbling Upon can be valid. In the end, it’s about what you find, what you choose to use, and if it works.
Once again, this narrative is stuck with the linear nature of traditional books. Choice happens in every stage of the design process. Within our linear process, this discussion is now about how choice can lead to developing the concept and metaphor. Once the conceptual direction has been established, there are more decisions to be made. Right up to when the production is locked.
Once you have established the intellectual foundation for your design, your concept and metaphor, you can then use these tools to make choices. Your concept and metaphor provide a basis for evaluating options and ideas, while choosing amongst them. Like using any tool, it will take time, energy, and effort to master.
Choice has a ripple effect. Each choice affects the next, and the next. Go boldly forth, but accept the fact that you may need to go back to a root decision and modify the entire tree at some point. Again, this kind of revision and refinement is not only OK, but part of a desirable path towards the best storytelling, and the best design. The fact that you will need time to make these refinements should tell you to start work early.
Never lose sight of your own intuition. However you must always evaluate your gut and check that you are helping to tell the story.
Sometimes, a burst of inspiration is enough. Sometimes, it can be misguided. View every idea through the looking glass of your concept and metaphor.
Allow yourself to make choices just because it looks good, or it sounds right. In the end, even when creating an unpleasant place, to help tell the story, the environment must draw the audience in, not repel them.
This corporate exhibit, designed by the author, was about bringing people together. Working with a Train Station metaphor made many choices; the columns, the arches, the basic materials; oxidized copper and marble, logical.
How does every choice feel? How do these feelings help tell the story and convey the message?
Before making any big decision, make a list of the pros and cons of each choice. It’s that whole writing thing again, it keeps coming back. Get your thoughts and ideas organized on paper.
Lists are not a new idea. Paper might not be your choice, but we know paper can be a metaphor for your app of choice.
Prioritize your options. Let the lesser choices fall off the bottom of the list. Use the words, or the pictures, or the musical phrases in the list to assist in your process.
Sometimes when it’s crunch time, you may have forgotten why the decision is on the table. You’re then neither an idiot, or alone.
Hunt down the reason for the choice. Keep a record. More notes. Sigh. Was the color OK before you decided to change it? Then why did you choose to make that change?
Whatever the motivation for the evolution of the design, keep records. Keep notes. Keep track of your ideas. It is often important to take steps back and check yourself and the direction of the process.
Understand your own choices and what has motivated those choices.
It is always important to be aware of the surrounding culture. If you are an American designer, designing only contemporary drama or sitcoms for television, and working only in the United States, this might have little meaning. While there are still some cultural differences between American cities, or between urban and rural America, those variations have largely become homogenized. However, these differences, large and small, are critical research for any period work.
Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, 1875, oil on panel, James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834—1903).
Visual Language can provide a context for making choices that help tell the story.
Taking a world view, designers need to know that each and every culture has a set of symbols, visual symbols like traffic signs and hand gestures, in addition to written and/or spoken language. These are Visual Language.
Every production will also have a set of symbols, possibly a unique set of symbols rooted in the culture and popular culture of the audience. This Visual Language is created out of the story, the production, the concept, and the metaphor.
Visual Language is a communication system using visual elements. It is present in all art and in general communications, not just theatre. The vocabulary of a specific show might include colors shared by all of the design disciplines, specific patterns, and/or other textures. These are simplistic examples.
Also considered to be a Nocturne Painting; The Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch, known as the Night Watch, 1642, oil on canvas, by Rembrandt.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler used the phrase Nocturne Painting to describe paintings that poetically illustrate night scenes. While both descriptive and evocative of his works, the same can be said of the works of other artists, before and after Whistler. Nocturne Paintings have their own Visual Language.
Context (or the relationships between visual elements) is critical, and allows the audience to read between the lines, or visualize the Sub-Text.
Context can also refer to congruent architectural styles. A high rise would not generally be built in a suburban residential neighborhood. One reason why that wouldn’t be done is that the larger building would be out of context with the surrounding buildings. Clothes need to be in context with each other and their surroundings.
Every production, metaphor, and project will have its own set of symbols and visual language. Some might be specific to the production and environment. If your visual language might not be familiar to your audience, you have to clearly define the language.
Every production creates a new world.
Is the environment realistic? Does this piece require abstraction? That might mean beautifully painted (even if cartoony) backdrops, or a space that is just platforms and symbols. Is the right choice a combination of design elements like realistic costumes in an abstracted physical environment? Which direction will help the audience feel the experience as intended? How does the choice of a direction for the soundscape affect the look and feel of the environment and the clothes? If the sound is a cold wind, and the costumes are bathing suits, what message does that send?
How then does the design team best create the world in which the action of the play will take place? In any event, how can the choices help to express the emotional tenor of the piece?
Environment and world are beautifully broad terms. At once, they encompass the light, the sound, the physical space, the stuff, the gear, and the clothes. From this starting point, a production team can address specifics about the color and quality of the light, and the construction of the garments.
Often, allowing the audience to imagine is the best choice.
Designers confront choices and decisions that are not just details only they would notice but the very foundation of the subconscious experience of the audience. There may only be one audience member who notices that a uniform is out of date, or that the table setting is not correct in an otherwise historically accurate production, but those mistakes will color their experience. Remember, those Victorians had a specific utensil for every part of every meal.
Once you have made the choices that will determine how the story will be perceived by the production’s audiences, each designer will still have many decisions left to be made. Some will be personal, some will be influenced by the group. Every member of the design team and the director should agree on these choices, and on the path forward; bad things happen when members of the production team disagree at this point.
The Elephant Man is a play about a severely deformed man. It is based on a real person and a true story. Joseph Merrick, called John in the play, was an Englishman with severe physical deformities who was exhibited as a human curiosity called The Elephant Man. During the first few years of his life, his skin began to thicken and become lumpy, he developed enlarged lips, and a bony lump grew on his forehead. One arm and both feet became enlarged, at some point he fell and injured his hip, resulting in a permanent limp.
Thankfully, freak shows have simply gone out of style, or we as a species have evolved, but the play shows Merrick’s inherent humanity when he was introduced to enlightened people. The character himself is a metaphor for human mortality and aspiration.
The playwright suggests, and productions generally choose, not to use any prosthetics on the actor portraying Merrick. In fact, the actors who play the title role are generally physically beautiful and they convey (read act) the deformity physically. The audience imagines Merrick’s appearance.
This is a choice to allow the audience to use their imagination. It is also a decision to not allow the disfigured character, or the character design, to distract from the play’s message.
This metaphor is a basis for other choices then as well. All of the other design aspects need to reinforce the idea of human mortality and aspiration.
It will ultimately be for the director as referee to make sure that each individual interpretation supports one another as they march forward to illustrate a common message for the audience.
Each design element must be reviewed with the controlling image or metaphor in mind. A useful metaphor will suggest color palettes and the feel of the overall composition. Cotton Candy creates a light and fluffy picture, while a Polished Railroad Track would clearly suggest more straight lines/forms, cold colors, and hard surfaces.
Sometimes the image doesn’t come first, Sometimes, it might be your doodles of circular, or curved lines that lead you to that cotton candy image. That same image might suggest themes or direction for a musical underscore. Simple lines and free flowing pen or pencil on a blank page can help to begin to define ideas and choices.
Make the same considerations with regard to the forms and the masses suggested by your image. Don’t be restricted by your image while being guided by it; the metaphor is a direction. There are always going to be elements in a harsh world that need to be soft. The reverse is true as well. Your image is a guide, not a dictator; it should direct your choices and provide course correction when you have gone astray.
At the end of the day because it was pretty, or just seemed right might very well be the deciding factor.
The function of the environment is to support the story, while helping to tell or explain the story to the audience. The design isn’t just about the design, or the designer. The design must work.
Always move forward, even if you have to take steps backward to do so. Don’t drown in what-ifs, or what-could-have-beens.
Once a design decision has been made, it’s time to load up on confidence and move forward. The more bold or challenging the design decision, the more likely insecurity may sneak into your process. This is why you formulate your positive arguments.
Remind yourself why you made the design decision in the first place. Continually evaluate your positions and how you got there.
If your choices are correct. If your decision making is sound, go boldly forth. If you allow yourself to waiver once you have committed to the path, that can cause you to make wrong choices further along in the process.
Falling for Eve is the original, original story. With a twist.
Adam and Eve are innocents frolicking in the Garden of Eden. Unfortunately, paradise isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. When a slightly bored Eve decides to take a snack from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and Adam doesn’t follow suit, Eve alone is exiled. Adam is left to himself, in a very lonely garden. God faces an existential crisis; how can humanity ever get started?
Director Larry Raben, Scenic Designer Beowulf Boritt, and Lighting Designer Herrick Goldman settled on a retro 70s era aesthetic expressed visually by the work of the artist Shag.
Shag is a painter, designer, and illustrator whose style draws from commercial illustration, but is imbued with attitude, and a sly sense of humor. Shag’s paintings celebrate consumerism and consumption on vividly colored sharply rendered panels; the characters drink, smoke, and eat in lavish, stylish surroundings. Shag’s visuals are window-dressing for the themes and narratives in the paintings.
Jose Llana and Krystal Joy Brown.
Research, feelings and connections. The discussion and direction began with considering a green shag carpeting for the grass in Eden.
Boritt created an egg- or vagina-shaped set, appropriate to the creation story, all in white for Goldman to paint with light while advancing the story using striated lines, leafy organic patterns, and complementary colors. These textures and colors shifted with the mood and changing action. Color could be added or slowly drained out to return to the white void of creation. The forest/garden could also then quickly turn into an ocean at a moment’s notice.
© Josh Agle, courtesy of http://shag.com
Once everything all felt right, all of the pieces came together.
